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User blog:Fruipit/AutoWikiBrowser, and what it means for Baker Street
Okay, this is a blog post in regards to a few comments I've had on here. To start off, nice and short, yes, I employ and Auto Wiki Browser (hereby shortened to AWB), and no, it's not a bot. Now, for the long version. For those of you who don't know, and AWB is a program available on Windows that allows for faster edits. While it does work similar to a bot, it is not actually a bot. When using an AWB, the user has to double-check all edits made so that it doesn't make changes that are actually unwanted or wrong (as can happen with bots, as it's all automated –> see here). For some reason, despite this being a wikia, people hate me using wikipedia as a source. Regardless, I'm going to quote their page on AWBing and what it means for a wiki. :...designed to make tedious repetitive tasks quicker and easier. Now, what would you deem to be tedious repetitive tasks? ... Well, the edits I've made using them. For background, mostly just for me to get my point across, this wiki was founded on January 28, 2013. It has been active for almost 18 months and these edits have not been made. Thus, to facilitate making them, I employed help. Some people believe these edits to be useless. I disagree. I have not heard any opposition for actually making the edits, but rather the way I choose to make them. Let me be clear; this does not matter. I will be making the edits, regardless of whether or not I can use AWB. The arguments against its usage really are pointless when considering what it is designed to do. It is not a bot. It is just a way to make easy edits that are consistent across every page. I don't miss things this way. It picks up double words (he left the the house the way it was), spacing (221B Baker Street is a street...), and American English words (realize –> realise); in short, things that we as humans miss because that's just what we do. I do not trust a bot to make all these edits accurate. One thing I noticed was if the word 'the' is followed by another word beginning with those three letters ('theatre', 'therapist, etc.), it automatically removes the word 'the'. Do we really want a bot doing that? I don't. That is far more detrimental to the wiki, imo. Another argument is that it 'clogs up the recent wiki activity (RWA)'. Frankly, I don't think that's much of an issue. We have five editors. The alternative seems to be gaps of hours between edits, when nothing much gets done. The final argument was that it ups my edit count, and 'gives me badges'. Well, turn the badges off. As said, the only reason I use it is to facilitate the same edits I would be making without it. So, I will stop using this program, however I disagree entirely with the reasoning behind it. Category:Blog posts